The Passions of Emma (58 page)

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Authors: Penelope Williamson

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

BOOK: The Passions of Emma
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“Oh, Stu, I’ve been so afraid . . .” She choked over the words, over the fear and guilt and horror that was building up a dam in her. “It’s what she always threatened me with after I became an embarrassment to the family with my chair. She said she’d sent Emma off to Georgia, but I thought, I thought . . .”
He muttered a foul word beneath his breath, and she flinched. “Does Geoffrey know?”
She shook her head, pressing her lips together, hard. The dam was tall and thick now, strangling her. “He thinks she’s in Georgia, too. Mama told him Emma’s nerves have been delicate and unsteady lately, and the New England winters made it worse.” She gripped her hands together in her lap robe, twisting them, afraid of what would happen now that the secret was out. Of what her mother would do to
her.
“What—what are you going to tell Geoffrey? You can’t tell him why . . .”
He half-turned away from her, as if he couldn’t bear her presence anymore, and his voice took on a mean edge. “What would I tell him as to the why of it? All I have is only a suspicion, after all . . . And one of us has already said too much.”
“What do you care so much for anyway?” she shouted, ashamed, scared, oh-so very afraid of losing him—losing him when she’d never even had him. “You wouldn’t come for me, not
even when I begged you. But you came quick enough for
her.
I suppose you’re in love with her like all the other men in the world.”
He was silent for a moment, then he surprised her by coming close to her again. “I care because she’s my friend. I’ve never been in love with her, but I’ve always liked her.”
He started to lift his hand, and she thought he would touch her, but he let his hand fall back down to his side. He was, she understood now, never going to touch her, not in the way she wanted, not in the way that rough man had touched her sister, Emma.
“What happened to your heart, Maddie? Did it get broken along with your spine?”
“Of course it got broken!” She flung her head back, and the tears ran out her eyes and into her hair and down into the corners of her mouth. “And what do you know of my life? You don’t have to
live
like this . . . She doesn’t have to live like this.”
“That chair is not Emma’s fault.”
“No, it’s Willie’s fault!” she screamed at him, screamed at herself, at Willie dead now and in heaven. “It’s Willie’s fault and he killed himself over it, and I want to die.” She buried her head in her hands, pressing her fingers hard against the bones of her face, trying to stop the noise of her ragged sobs. “Go away.”
“Maddie . . .”
“Please just go away.”
He was quiet for so long, she opened her mouth to plead with him again. She wanted him away, away, away . . . He was always going away and leaving her. Then she heard his boot heels clicking on the flagstones, walking away from her, leaving her.
Maddie lifted her head just as a sudden gush of icy rain came blowing up off the water. She wrapped her fingers around the slick wooden rims of her wheels and tried to push, but the rubber tires were stuck. Sobbing, she pushed harder and they began to turn, slowly, then faster . . . were turning too fast now, going too fast down the slope of the terrace, toward the edge that dropped off into the bay, flying now into gray water and gray skies, flying—
Maddie screamed once, loud and sharp, as the chair struck one of the cast-iron vases, skidded sideways, and teetered over, spilling her onto the rough flagstones.
She was weeping so hard, her heart was pounding so hard with fear and hopelessness and the utter desperate loneliness, that she didn’t at first feel the strong arms come around her. Not until they lifted her, holding her close against the solid comfort of his chest.
She turned in to him, pressed her wet face against his, pressed her lips to the hard bone of his jaw and tasted salt again, but whether they were her tears or his, she didn’t know.
“My darling,” Stu said. “My poor, broken darling.”
He came for her during that time of day when you can sense darkness falling, even though the sky is still filled with light. His pale face was luminous in the gloom of the hall.
“Emma . . .”
He came closer to her, where she was sitting on her bench beneath her window.
“Emma,” he said again.
He knelt before her. Her hands were lying on her lap, palms up, and he lifted them gently, tenderly. “I didn’t know about this. I swear to you, Emma, darling, I did not know.”
Geoffrey chafed her hands with his own. She thought they must feel cold to him. She’d been cold for so long, she didn’t notice anymore.
“Do you believe me?” he said. “Say you believe me.”
She looked into his face, fair and long-boned, so familiar to her, a face she had known all her life. Looked into his flat, gray-water eyes that she could never read.
“I believe you,” she said, although she wasn’t sure if she believed him or not, and it didn’t matter. He was here now and he was going to take her out of this place. To take her home.
E
mma had thought of only one thing since she’d come home to The Birches the night before. To go for a long, long walk and look up at the wide, open sky, and breathe it in, just breathe it all in.
And stepping through the big coffered ebony doors this morning had surely been a wonder—to be able to go somewhere without the matron and her jangle of keys.
But now that she was out here on the piazza, dressed in her sealskin coat and hat, her hands stuffed deep and warm into her muff, she was afraid to take the first step. She felt so broken inside, as though pieces of herself had broken off. Jagged, jigsaw pieces that had settled wrong and wouldn’t quite fit together again.
She could go back into the house and ask Geoffrey to come with her, she thought. But when he was with her, she could feel him staring at her and it made her uncomfortable. She wondered what he looked for in her face—marks of Emma’s passions run amok, signs of Emma’s excitable nature found and lost.
She knew she wasn’t mad, had never been mad, but they had broken her anyway. They had made her afraid again.
She thought just then that she heard the old twig rocker creak, but there was no wind. And when she looked around at it, she saw that it was still. The sound, though, so familiar and evocative, gave her the courage to walk down the steps and strike out across a lawn
lumpy with old snow. A mist was gathering like smoke off in the birches.
She stopped once and looked up at the sky, letting her eyes fill up with the blueness. Breathing it in.
And when she began to walk again toward the stand of birches, all white and black and gray in the winter landscape, she felt better. Not her old self, though. More like someone else.
A thicker mist, pearly and opaque, rose off the bay. She couldn’t tell where the water ended and the sky began. The beach was gray drifts of sand and snow.
The last time she’d been here was the day she’d sailed herself home in the storm. She’d left the
Icarus
in a terrible state, but someone, she saw now, had been taking care of the sloop for her.
“You went and left your sloop in a fine mess, Emma Tremayne,” said a grating voice she had not thought to hear again.
And the jagged, broken pieces shifted inside her, hurting.
He came out from among the bare and withered trees, with his hands in the pockets of his black pea coat and his slouch hat shading his face, came right up to her until he was so close she could have touched him. But she was too afraid now to touch him.
“You’ve come back, then,” he said, his breath trailing across his face in thin clouds. His beautiful, battered face.
“Back?”
“From your cousins’ fine plantation house. In Georgia.”
Her skin was cold and damp, but her heart beat fast and tremulously. He had the most startling green eyes.
I cannot bear this again, she thought.
“Donagh happened to see you at the train station yesterday,” he said, “that’s how I came to know that you were back.”
“Yes.” They could have driven down from the Warren asylum, it was only a few miles. But Geoffrey had said they had to come by train, so that no one who mattered would know the truth. Of where she’d been.
“I thought you’d come to check on your sloop first thing,” he
said. “That’s why I’m here. I want to know how you’re faring, Emma.”
She felt a flash of anger at him. Anger that he had been so right about costs and consequences.
“I’m going to marry Mr. Alcott,” she said. “Mama doesn’t want to wait the two full years anymore, and so we’ll have the wedding in June. In the garden. Mama says he’s as solid as the bricks in the mills he owns.”
He was staring at her hard, his eyes going up and down the length of her. She looked away.
“Is there a baby, Emma?”
The broken, jagged pieces slipped again. She wanted suddenly to go back into the house, where it was warm. Safe.
She blinked and looked at him again. “You didn’t go to New York?”
“No. Not yet.” She heard it now, the grayness of unhealed pain in his hoarse whisper. “I needed to know how you were faring. If there was a baby . . .”
When she looked at him, it was hard to remember that she wasn’t supposed to love him anymore. Somehow she found the courage to reach up and touch his face, to trace the thin white scar that slashed across his cheek.
“Shay,” she said. “Shay McKenna,” as if trying out his name, saying it for the first time. “Did you ever love me, even a little?”
“Love you?” He turned his head and brushed his lips across her fingers. “I’m loving you now,
mo chridh
. After I’m dead, a thousand years from now, whatever’s left of me, be it a soul or just a handful of dust, that will be loving you.”
Her hand fell back down to her side. “But I’m marrying Geoffrey. It’s for the best.”
She saw his throat move as he swallowed, saw his chest move as he breathed. “It’s for the best if you are happy. Will you be happy, Emma?”
“I’m cold. I . . . I’d better go in now.”
She walked away from him, back down the beach and into the birches. She didn’t have to turn around to know he was staring after her as though he would never see her again.
Geoffrey stood within the shadows of the velvet-swagged doorway and looked at her.
She stood at the windows, looking out at the birches, but he didn’t think she saw them. Her eyes were focused inward, to a place deep inside her. Shadows lay like old bruises under her cheekbones.
She must have gone for a walk after all, for she wore her sealskin coat, although she’d unbuttoned it partway. He could see a band of lace and tiny seed pearls that was the high collar of her dress. It wrapped around a neck impossibly long and thin.
He told himself he needed to be patient, that she’d only been home a day, but he felt as though he were shouting at her from across an endless distance, and if he reached out and touched her she might vanish.
He was afraid he didn’t know her anymore, that perhaps he had never known her. No one would tell him precisely what her “excitable nature” had led her to do that her uncle and mother had felt she needed a rest at the asylum to cure her. He’d tried to find out, but not very hard because he really didn’t want to know.

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